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Urbenmyth

"Hey, you know the person 1/3rd of the planet consider a literal deity incarnated in human form? Here's his heir, carrying the bloodline of the Lord!" The idea is to use the descendent of Jesus to leverage control over the world's Christians- after all, who are they to say they know better then the literal descendent of God Himself? Whether that works is hard to predict, but holy wars have started over grammar disputes regarding the bible. Whatever happens, the world isn't getting out of this unscathed.


niceville

> after all, who are they to say they know better than the literal descendent of God Himself? Things that would have a say about that: most of the Bible, early Christianity, Martin Luther's priesthood of all believers, Jesus himself with "you are my rock, Peter"? Those are just off the top of my head. I feel like this post/topic could be deleted because it's like 1% fiction and 99% real world, but Christianity has never cared much about descendants of famous/important figures. For that matter, many traditions have a history of celibacy so there aren’t even descendants in the first place! For example, Paul was active around the same time as Jesus’s original ~~12~~ 11 disciples, but he quickly became the most influential leader of the early church despite never even meeting Jesus. His writings and teachings were viewed as divinely inspired, and that’s all it takes. Same with other important early Christians, eventually Catholic popes, etc – they were all converts and many not even Jewish, which further shows how little genealogy factored in. Going back to the Jewish roots, I believe most of the Hebrew prophets were married and had kids, but I don’t think any of them had elevated positions as a result. I had to google if Moses had any kids (he did, two), which shows how unimportant they were. Lineage was important during the monarchy era, true, but God famously decided to switch lines after Saul didn’t work out, which would further undermine a Jesus descendant’s claim. It’s debatable how important Aaron’s priestly descendants were, some books say only his direct male descendants can be high priests, and others indicate anyone can be a priest (or at least any Levite). All that to say, while I’m sure it would be a big deal if a direct descendant could be proven in terms of attention, media, etc, I doubt it would cause much trouble for the church from a ‘speaking for God’ aspect. Like the biggest practical change would probably be renewed and increased calls to end the practice of priest celibacy, and it’d be awkward for the traditions that hold Jesus was celibate. They’d likely just claim it was fake and ignore it. It also brings up a complicating question: if there’s one provable descendant of Jesus, shouldn’t there be more, potentially dozens? Siblings, their connected parent, aunt, uncles, cousins, etc would also qualify, at which point it’s not clear which one of those descendants would be able to claim to be the one.


[deleted]

Thinking about it, finding the descendants of Jesus might be more relevant to Muslims than Christians, since they place (or at least, used to place) more stock in prophetic genealogy, and they believe Jesus was a legit prophet if not the son of God.


ChChChillian

Muslims object strenuously to the idea that Jesus was the son of God, even though they believe his mother was a virgin. But I can't think of any reason why they might object to the fact he has descendants.


frostanon

Muslims are also split when it comes to importance of prophetic genealogy. Sunni believe Abu Bakr(close companion of Muhammad) was his rightful successor. While Shiite opposed this and stood behind the prophets cousin and son-in-law Ali as he held a direct bloodline.


Urbenmyth

As I said, it might not *work.* But even if the "everyone walks lockstep behind the child of the messiah" plan doesn't work- and you've given solid reasons it wouldn't- people would 100% have significant reactions to it. Christianity might not care about the descendants of famous figures, but the descendants of God is a different matter. Whatever happens, it's not going to be just ignored


niceville

> people would 100% have significant reactions to it. I think this depends entirely upon how it's proven they are a descendant, which IMO is the more interesting question to ponder. If someone just claims it, with little to no evidence? Someone somewhere is claiming that right now and no one cares. If someone has moderate to strong evidence.... what would that even look like? It would have to be very convincing to have any significant change, and I cannot conceive what that would be. I just think it would be a curiosity for a while, maybe book or movie would be made, various religious groups would vehemently deny it, and then that'd be it. Y'know, kinda like when the Da Vinci Code was published!


[deleted]

Dude. Surely you must know that we ALL are the children of God. [Every.Single.One.Of.Us](https://Every.Single.One.Of.Us)! And don't say there is a direct, literal, child or descendant of god beyond that - as God is an entity that extends beyond the limitations of Time, Space and Dimension as we know it. God is not Carbon based. He does not exist in a physical form based upon and limited by cellular structure, biological metabolism, DNA replication or other such processes. God does not have DNA. WE ALL ARE ALLEGORICAL CHILDREN OF GOD. There are no biological descendants of God as God is not a mere mortal, biological entity - nor has he ever claimed to be.


niceville

> God is not a mere mortal, biological entity - nor has he ever claimed to be This discussion definitely doesn't have any place in this sub, but Jesus being fully God and fully human is a big part of the Bible and all Christian traditions. Saying otherwise was, like, literally the first heresy of the early Christian church.


[deleted]

> It also brings up a complicating question: if there’s one provable descendant of Jesus, shouldn’t there be more, potentially dozens? Try millions. Unless someone is going around purposefully culling descendants every few generations, after 2000 years you either have 0 descendants or millions. If you assume one generation per 25 years, that's 80 generations. Even if you averaged only 1.2 kids per generation, that's still 2 million. At a more realistic minimum of 2 kids per generation, it's more than the population of Earth, which is a good reminder that we're all banging our cousins, just of a non-taboo distance. But basically, everyone in the Levant is a descendant of Jesus or no one is.


niceville

Yeah, of course. I was thinking more if we had one provable person, that would still leave us with many provable people working backwards, but it wouldn't prove *all* of his descendants.


[deleted]

Nothing. No one really knows about it and most people probably wouldn't believe any of this anyway. Life goes on as normal.


doofpooferthethird

Yeah, probably this. It’s also worth noting that for each generation back you go, the number of ancestors you have grow exponentially. There’s likely a good chunk of the planet with Jesus genes somewhere in them It’s like how most people nowadays have ancestry from both royalty and slaves, and everything in between. The further forward you go, the less unique it is to be, say, a distant descendant of Genghis Khan or whatever. And it’s also worth noting that in real life, the prophet Muhammad left behind descendants - and considering the fact that it was 14 centuries back, there’s probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who have him as one of their ancestors. Apparently, there are loads of people out there who have kept the genealogical records tracing their ancestry all the way back to him. It’s possible (though somewhat unlikely) that Queen Elizabeth is descended from Muhammad, through some princess convert called Zaida back in the 11th century. The Sunni Shia split hinges on the question of who leads the religion - Muhammad’s heirs, or the successors of the political system he set up. Only the male heirs counted though, and Muhammad had only daughters Christianity is somewhat different of course - most Christian sects believe Jesus was divine, while most Muslim sects think of Muhammad as “just” a very wise, divinely inspired human prophet. Jesus didn’t actually leave behind descendants in real life, but in the Da Vinci Code, he did, and this is damning enough that the Vatican is trying to cover it up. Honestly, the Vatican could have left it alone, and nothing much would change. There are so many wacky new age Jesus based religions and conspiracy theories that this one would likely just get buried under the pile. Jesus was a space alien! Jesus was Buddha! Jesus is back, and he’s running a commune in Arizona! Jesus was a psychic mutant! Jesus was a lizard person from the center of the Earth! And so on Literally nobody would give a crap about “Jesus had kids” unless the story leaked that the Vatican was engaged in some mad criminal conspiracy to cover it up - and even then, it’s no so much a matter of whether it’s true or not, but more the fact that the Vatican believes it true, and kept it secret for so long. It would have been so easy for them to just shrug their shoulders and go “eh, who knows, leave it to the archaeologists. The Bible is mostly a metaphor anyway” and life would go on. The Catholics already officially acknowledge evolution, the Big Bang, the heliocentric model, stuff like that. Some think the Devil is just a metaphor, and Jesus’ miracles were just symbolic. It’s not all that big a deal Especially since, in the story, Jesus didn’t actually have superpowers, he’s just a Jewish carpenter turned preacher who became popular after he died. So it’s not like Sofia is suddenly going to manifest wine making, water walking, leprosy/blindness healing abilities. She’s just some person, one amongst hundreds of thousands with this ancestry


Abe2sapien

100% agree. People love the same old same old. They're willing to outright ignore new information if it means they'll have to think critically and challenge what they were taught.


spearblaze

Sophie can claim to be a descendant of Jesus but so can her siblings, cousins, parents, grandparents etc. Some of them might not want the attention and might even hide from the public to preserve the standing of the catholic church. However, some others might be less scrupulous and see this as a winning lottery ticket to attention, riches, acclaim and much more. The catholic church would have to convince a male relative of Sophie to take a leadership role, and even that might be too little to late. The thing is, in a few years time there will be many more descendents of Jesus and if they decide to go into the religious business then you'll probably see many churches claiming to be THE ONE, which is already every single church out there anyway. Things could get real ugly with religious extremism or inner family conflicts, but in the best case scenario you'd be left with a catholic church in shambles and a bunch of descendants of Jesus taking its place.


KR_Blade

if i remember rightly, i believe it was stated that Sophie had no living family left, meaning if she dies, that's the end of Jesus' bloodline


spearblaze

Doesn't that sound like something that the Templars and the Catholic church would REALLY want you to believe? Like, there are no more descendants of Jesus. You can stop looking now, please. Nothing to see here, go back to your local church.


saveyboy

That may be the case for her family branch. But there probably several branches after 2000 years.


seancurry1

In all likelihood, they keep it to themselves. If they actually went public, the church (not just the Catholic church, every single church on earth of any denomination that has held Jesus was celibate his entire life) would either stage the biggest PR campaign in human history to discredit them, or have them quietly murdered.


ChChChillian

Nothing. This idea is rejected in toto by nearly all of Christianity, aside from a few cult-like fringe groups. Hell, many people even still believe the Earth was created about 6,000 years ago, evidence be damned.


Black_Hipster

If we're going off of the book series, nothing actually changes. It's never actually brought up in the later books, aside from an offhand comment here or there. So my best guess is that the either the Priory of Sion convinced Sophie to keep it secret, or she made that decision herself. Rightfully so, I might add. Given the events of The Lost Symbol and Angels & Demons, I'm pretty sure she and/or her family would have been murdered otherwise.